The New School Creative Writing Program is proud to announce its list of 2018 alumni and faculty book publications. This year, 30 books have been published by alumni of the MFA in Creative Writing Program and 11 books have been published by faculty of the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Faculty member Sigrid Nunez highlighted this year's list with her novel The Friend (Penguin Random House) which won the 2018 National Book Award in Fiction.

The list includes publications from the "Big Four" publishing houses, university presses, and independent publishers. All four genres of study offered by the MFA in Creative Writing Program are represented: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and writing for children and young adults.

Each year, the Creative Writing Program celebrates these authors with its annual book party. The 2018 authors will be celebrated on Thursday, February 28, 2019 at 6:30pm in Wollman Hall, 65 W. 11th Street. This event is free and open to all with RSVP.

Congratulations to all!

*If you published a book this year or know of a fellow MFA alumni who published a book, please let us know by emailing writingprogram@newschool.edu and we will add you to this list.

Helen Schulman was born in New York City, where she lives, writes, teaches. She received a BA at Cornell University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She has published six novels. Her most recent novel, Come With Me, released on November 27, 2018. Its a book "about how technology breaks apart and then re-configures a family." Helen’s fiction, non-fiction, and reviews have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review, and The Paris Review. She co-edited with Jill Bialosky the anthology, Wanting a Child. She has written numerous screenplays, including co-writing an adaptation of her novel P.S., which was made into a film in 2004 starring Laura Linney. Helen has taught in graduate programs at Columbia University, New York University. She is a tenured Professor of Writing and Fiction Chair of the MFA Creative Writing Program at New School and is the Executive Director of WriteOn NYC which is a fellowship that trains MFA writing students for careers in teaching through providing underserved NYC children with writing instructors.

1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost, and Isabel Archer in Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, although, truth be told, I hate playing favorites.

2. When did you know you were a writer?

I knew I was a writer when I began a serious writing habit, meaning when I wrote regularly and diligently and put it first before everything else I did. Of course, life has intervened in this "habit of being" (I'm stealing the title of the Letters of Flannery O'Connor here) and there has been many a time when I could not put writing first: like when I had children, or when I had to take care of my parents, earn a living, stuff like that. But the need to write now is ingrained in my DNA and ideally, it is a continual practice, like exercise and brushing your teeth.

3. What are you currently working on?

A new book. Shhhh! Can't talk about it yet.

4. How has your writing process changed over the years?

This should be an addendum to question #2. When I was in graduate school I wrote late at night. When I got out I wrote early in the morning before work. When I had babies, I wrote when they napped and when I could get away to writer havens like Yaddo. There have been weeks and maybe even months when I have so much work to do teaching etc. that I have no time to write, and then it's catch as catch can. When that happens, it's almost as if the project I'm working on turns to marble, and I have to find some point of entry where I can make it elastic enough to start writing again. Now that I am on leave, I've had much more time for writing, and especially for reading, which has been an enormous, calming, enlightening pleasure.

5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.

I'll do it even better, one word: imperceptible. As in I proceed extremely slowly.

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.

Keisha Bush was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts and currently lives in East Harlem. She received her MFA in creative writing from The New School, where she was a Riggio Honors Teaching Fellow and recipient of the NSPE Dean's scholarship. She is currently a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency 2018-2019. She has received fellowships from the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, Moulin à Nef in France, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Vermont Studio Center. Her debut novel, No Heaven For Good Boys, is forthcoming with Spiegel & Grau/Random House.

1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

My favorite villain is Oedipus because he is tragically both villain and hero, and more often than not, we are caught in similar conundrums in our lives. We all feel like him at some point in our lives, if not every day.

My favorite protagonist is the narrator in Rilke’s Duino Elegies. I am in constant exchange with the angels, and the protagonist in the Elegies captures the unnerving, and nagging, question of my life, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” I keep a copy of the Rilke’s Elegies close by for spontaneous readings. My other favorite protagonist is Caesar. How I wish I had been there, to be that one friend Caesar needed. Every time I read those pages I will him to stay home, but he always goes to the meeting. Damn you, Brutus, for being weak.

2. When did you know you were a writer?

I have an exercise I do every couple of years when I am feeling unsure, or insecure, about myself and my writing practice. In the middle of the day, I decide to give up writing for good and go get a bonafide, 9-5 (slave) job like I used to have, some years ago. The thought then causes a severe onslaught of nausea, anxiety, depression, and shortness of breath, driving me to the edge of some sort of melt-down as pain sears through my heart. I then realize that I have no option but to continue to write so that I can live to see the next day.

3. What are you currently working on?

I’m lucky enough to have been accepted to the 2018-2019 Workspace Residency program generously offered through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, so I have long days of looking out across the Hudson River to ponder and scheme, in my own private studio. Currently, I am working on a dystopian world in which there are black people. I’m also working on a visual arts project related to a separate novel I recently completed. The goal of this project is to marry visual arts, literature, and performance together in the same space, simultaneously engaging the narrative thread of the story in a three-dimensional manner in an attempt to mirror how we live and engage, with one another.

4. How has your writing process changed over the years?

I don’t stress about the times I am not writing. Life is very busy for me and I don’t have the luxury to sit and write every day, and that is fine. Instead, I write in bursts and when the rabbit hole opens, I know I can jump in and dive all the way down because within the dark it is so bright. These “bursts” can last from three weeks to seven months depending on how long the initial draft takes, so it varies with each project.

5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.

I attempt to push beyond boundaries: bending structure, narrative, and genre at any, and every, chance I can find within my work.

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.

Nico Rosario is an artist, researcher, and activist, whose work meets at the intersections of creative arts, politics, culture, and education, with a focus on youth and subcultures. A writer and photographer, Nico was a Riggio Honors Writing and Democracy Scholar at The New School; she received her Master’s in Education in Arts and Cultural Settings from Kings College London and her MFA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently at work on her first novel.

1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

Hmm. I'm trying to think of villains in general... I don't think I usually read books with a pronounced "bad guy." One protagonist/antagonist relationship that I love, though, is Nick Twisp and his alter ego, François Dillinger, in Youth in Revolt.

2. When did you know you were a writer?

I think I knew I was good at writing when my 4th-grade teacher accused me of plagiarism on a book report. (I didn't do it.) But, honestly, I still don't think of myself as a writer and I'm not sure I ever will. (This is probably more of a self-esteem issue.)

3. What are you currently working on?

I'm writing a novel that I started in John Reed's class at The New School several years ago. I thought I'd be finished by now! But I'm allowing myself to work on it in my own time, in the way that feels necessary, so it'll be finished whenever it is finished.

4. How has your writing process changed over the years?

Well, for starters, I actually started taking my writing more seriously and making time for the work. Now that I'm back on a 9-5 schedule—as opposed to being a student—I have to maneuver the writing into my day, which is tough. And I have to maintain the voice of the novel for a much longer period of time than I was accustomed to in the past, something I'd never had to do before. So this all affects my writing differently. But what I also love about the process now is how it feels like a part of me, unlike before when it felt like a task to complete. This is my actual work, my art object, my vision of the world.

5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.

I once saw a film (Circumstance by Maryam Keshavarz) and the person who introduced described it by saying, "This is a film I want to date." And I hope someone will say that about my writing someday.

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA in Creative Writing Program office.

Mira Jacobis the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary Eagles Prize. In addition, it received an honor from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association and was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. She is the co-founder of much-loved Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to the city’s sweetest stage. Her writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, Buzzfeed, and Tin House, and she has a drawn column on Shondaland. She has appeared on national and local television and radio and has taught writing to students of all ages in New York, New Mexico, and Barcelona. She currently teaches at The New School. In September 2014, Mira was named the Emerging Novelist Honoree at Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, where she received a commendation from the U.S. Congress. She is currently drawing and writing her graphic memoir, Good Talk: Conversations I’m Still Confused About (Random House, 2019). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son and teaches fiction writing at the New School.

1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

I cackled out loud reading Julia Toneybee Leroy, the blue-blooded heiress who writes an apology letter to "You, African Americans" in Kaitlyn Greenidge's We Love You, Charlie Freeman. Later, in the New York Times article "Who Gets to Write What," Greenidge explains how she had to "love this monster into existence" and I can feel that in the reading, the precise fury in making her awful, the care taken to find her heart, the deftness of pinning her to her small place in history.

As for protagonists, I don't know that I want to live in her brain (the way I would with, say, the narrator of Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum) but I often find myself thinking of Stephanie in Jennifer Egan's short story "A to B." There's a moment when she carries her own devastation into the backyard to detonate and I relate--not to her particular circumstance, per se, but to the emotional acrobatics required of a women who lives in close proximity to her rage.

I have a book coming out in March called Good Talk. It is a graphic memoir about love and race in America. It's also a love letter to the lost art of talking.

4. How has your writing process changed over the years?

A few years ago, it became a writing-and-drawing process. With any luck, it will at some point become a scriptwriting process. I guess, more than anything, my trajectory has been marked by a distinct lack of knowing what is next on the horizon and forgiving myself for it.

5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.

Equal parts heart and hustle.

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA Creative Writing office.

MFA Creative Writing faculty member Sigrid Nunez has won the 2018 National Book Award for her novel The Friend. Announced last night at the National Book Award Ceremony in lower Manhattan, the prize jury called the novel an "exquisitely written and deeply humane exploration of grief, literature and memory."

In her acceptance speech, Sigrid thanked her agent, publisher, and the staff at Riverhead Books, and said, “I became a writer not because I was seeking community, but rather because I thought it was something I could do alone, and hidden, in the privacy of my own room." She continued, "How lucky to have discovered that writing books made the miraculous possible: to be removed from the world and to be a part of the world at the same time.”

The novel was chosen for the award from a pool of 368 fiction books submitted for consideration. The National Book Awards are judged by a distinguished panel of writers, translators, critics, librarians, and booksellers.

Sigrid has been on The New School's faculty for 13 years, teaching in both the MFA Creative Writing Program and the undergraduate Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy.

Each year, the MFA in Creative Writing Program partners with the National Book Foundation, presenters of the National Book Award, to host the annual National Book Award Finalists Medal Ceremony and Reading.

Victoria Richards is a poet, freelance writer and second-year MFA Creative Writing student at The New School. She holds a BS degree in Public Relations from St. John’s University. Victoria has a passion for encouraging children to appreciate and create literature for self-discovery and is a 2018-2019 T&W Editorial Associate. Lastly, Victoria is a connoisseur of all things Black girl magic!

1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

One of my favorite villains is the Warden in Holes by Louis Sachar. She made her nail polish from rattlesnake venom and I love a nice red nail color. One of my favorite protagonists is Hermione Granger because she’s a maneater and the book describes her to be of African descent. But that’s another story for another day.

2. When did you know you were a writer?

I knew I WAS a writer about halfway into my MFA program at The New School.

3. What are you currently working on?

As of now, I’m working on playing with my poetry. So basically I’m really getting into fantastical writing that children and young adults would hopefully be into. My writing is always best when I just break all the rules and play as much as I can. So I’m working on having fun.

4. How has your writing process changed over the years?

My writing process has changed in a spiritual and meditative way. I meditate a lot more now and it helps me develop character, sound, and tone in my poetry and short stories.

5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.

My writing style is like food that isn’t good for you but tastes delicious.

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA Creative Writing office.

Three cheers toSigrid Nunez, a long-time faculty member in the Creative Writing Program, whose novel The Friend has been nominated for the National Book Award in Fiction. Sigrid has been on The New School's faculty for 13 years, teaching in both the MFA program and the undergraduate Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy.

Aditi Sriram teaches Critical Thinking and Creative Writing at Ashoka. She has written for several international publications including The Washington Post, The NewYorkTimes,The Guardian and The Atlantic. Her first book will be out in December 2018; it is a narrative nonfiction book about Pondicherry, as part of a series on Indian cities by Aleph Book Company in Delhi. For more information, visit her website, www.aditisriram.com

Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

Villains, what a great question! First to come to mind is Charles Kinbote, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov's brilliant and clever novel Pale Fire. Kinbote is yet another classic, Nabokovian unreliable narrator, and while his actions are more sneaky than anything else, there's something wonderfully sinister about him throughout the book. As for a protagonist, one of my favorites is Julie from The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. At the beginning of the novel she is just another white upper class South African woman; by the end, she is someone very different. Gordimer shows Julie's sensitivity to her environment evolve with each page of the book, and it's just mesmerizing.

When did you know you were a writer?

I never took my own writing seriously, until I did a workshop organized through Columbia University's Alumni Center in 2009. Each of us had to submit a writing sample, and then bring it in to workshop. A group of strangers listened to me read and gave me surprisingly positive feedback. It was the first time I felt like my words were actually readable!

What are you currently working on?

I have just submitted the final manuscript for a book I've been working on for the past 2 years. The subtitle is "A Short Biography of Pondicherry," and it's a narrative non-fiction book about a coastal city in South India called Pondicherry. The book will be out this December, with Aleph Book Company, which is based in Delhi, India.

How has your writing process changed over the years?

Thanks to several different workshops I've taken around NYC, which helped me get into the New School's MFA program, I have been able to practice editing my work down to manageable lengths and depths. Prior to that, my writing was unfettered and often lacked context. Nowadays, I retain that flair for getting excited on the page, but I'm able to contain it in more structured formats. To put it another way, I now take much more seriously the idea of having an actual reader on the other side of my work!

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA Creative Writing office.

John Reed is author of A Still Small Voice (Delacorte), The Whole (Simon & Schuster), Snowball's Chance (Melville House), All The World's A Grave (Penguin), Tales of Woe (MTV Press), and Free Boat (C&R Press). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. His work has been published in (selected) Art in America, the Believer, Slate, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Wall Street Journal, Vice, The New York Times, and Harpers. His writing has been anthologized in (selected) Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin), The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose), and Vitamin PH (Phaidon). John is teaching "Art and Culture for Writers" as well as an MFA fiction workshop, and is currently the Fiction Coordinator for the MFA Creative Writing Program.

1. Who is your favorite protagonist in literature? Antagonist?

Well, I think my favorite villain would have to be satan. Not the wicked conniving satan, but the laughing one:

(I am not a devil worshipper at all; I'm assuming this is from a purely literary perspective.) Favorite characters: As a tween, I fell in love with Estella from Great Expectations; as a college sophomore, I fell in love with Clavdia from Magic Mountain.)

2. When did you know you were a writer?

When I decided I was too old to go to law school.

3. What are you currently working on?

Many things! Finishing a long-term historical novel project, a couple of films, another novel, a few collections of essays.

4. How has your writing process changed over the years?

I don't need naps.

5. Describe your writing style in one line?

I only work on projects when I have high energy for them. I don't force anything, and almost always work on more than one thing at a time. I do like to have a "best energy" project.

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA Creative Writing office.

Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, The Friend. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the journals to which she has contributed are The Paris Review, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Threepenny Review, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and The Believer. Her honors and awards include four Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She has taught creative writing and literature at Columbia, Princeton, NYU, The New School, Boston University, and the University of California at Irvine, among others.

The Creative Writing program will be tabling at this year's Brooklyn Book festival. Come by booth 124 and say 'hello.'

We also have several alumni or faculty participating in events and panels this year:

Writing for Children and Young Adults alumni Dhonielle Clayton appears on "Fiercely Stunning Fantasy,"a discussion about high-stakes scenarios and unforgettable worlds in jeopardy.

Sigrid Nunez appears on "Fractured Lives," a discussion on life after you lose someone, as well as "My Pet Sorrow," a panel examining the role pets play in the grieving process, magical thinking, and anthropomorphism.

Writing for Children and Young Adults alumni Kheryn Callender appears on "Coming-of-Age," a panel investigating four impossible-to-forget protagonist’s struggle to define what home means as their families and friendships change around them.

Writing for Children and Young Adults alumni Renée Watson appears on "Telling Her Own Story," a panel for female YA authors to discuss how their writing explores the complexities of girlhood and why it's important for them to create bold, brave girls.

Sarah Jospitre is a second-year student in the Writing For Children & Young Adults section of the MFA Creative Writing Program. Recently, she has completed an internship in the editorial department at Random House Children’s Books and is setting her sights on a position at Scholastic in the fall. Her biggest influence is RL Stine whom she credits for her love of comedic horror and aspiration to be a children’s author.

1. Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

Miss Trunchbull (“Sit down, you squirming worm of vomit!”) and—not exactly a protagonist but he certainly aids the main character in many ways—Willy Wonka (“Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”)

2. When did you know you were a writer?

As I was graduating from NYU with a masters in Music Business. My mind started plotting a story about two young boys who find an old chest of antique clothing that allows them to change personalities with each piece of garment worn. In a prolonged and highly unnecessary fit of paranoia, I became highly suspicious of the previous owner of my rented cap and gown...

3. What are you currently working on?

“Blurred” – an extremely quirky, slightly horrific tale about the return of an infamous eye exam at an eerie middle school. Loosely based on how I lied about my eyesight in the third grade.

4. How has your writing process changed over the years?

Since starting the Creative Writing MFA program, I am more focused on outlining my work to make sure that I’ve hit all the major elements of a story arc. It is so exciting and immensely less devastating when I can look at an outline and have hope in where the story is going.

5. Describe your writing style in one sentence.

It is hilariously scary.

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA Creative Writing office.

Five Questions with Jeff Vasishta

Jeff Vasishta is a writer, music publisher and journalist who has interviewed many musicians including Prince, Beyonce, Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock. He is also an alumni of New School’s Riggio Honors program and recently taught the workshop Art of the Interview for New School’s Summer Writers Colony. You can follow Jeff on Twitter and read his latest book reviews here.

1) Who is your favorite villain, and who is your favorite protagonist in literature?

That’s a really hard one. Henry Drax from Ian McGuire’s “The North Water” is as bad as they come but word “favorite” wouldn’t apply to him. He’s plain evil. I guess Dickens’ Uriah Heep is up there because of the way he’s described and his obsequiousness make him great villain.

When I got my first magazine feature published when I was 18. I thought, “this is the life for me!”

3) What are you currently working on?

A novel, currently entitled “Limestone” (it may change) centered around Brooklyn gentrification and lot of freelance assignments - book reviews and real estate blogs.

4) How has your writing process changed over the years?

It’s generally been the same - wake up at the crack of dawn when it’s still dark out and let whatever’s been percolating in my head come out.

5) Describe your writing style in one sentence.

Transatlantic, multi-cultural with (hopefully) soul.

Five Questions, by Nicole L. Drayton. Nicole is a writer, screenwriter and independent filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts from The New School, and currently works for the university in the MFA Creative Writing office.

Join the Creative Writing Program, in collaboration with The New School's Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility, on Wednesday, April 18 for an evening of readings and conversation by renowned authors Valeria Luiselli and mónica teresa ortiz, around the politics of borders and belonging.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. A novelist (Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth) and essayist (Sidewalks and Tell Me How It Ends), her work has been translated into many languages. In 2014, Faces in the Crowd was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction.

mónica teresa ortiz was born and raised in Texas. Her work has recently appeared in Winter Tangerine Review, Texas Review, and her first poetry collection, muted blood, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in summer 2018.

This event is part of the Zolberg Institute's performance and film series pictures in motion. of motion. for motion.

The MFA in Creative Writing Program at The New School is proud to announce the winners of the 2017 New School Chapbook Series! Each year, alumni from the most recent cohort of graduates are invited to submit a chapbook of their work, in their genre of study -Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, or Writing for Children and Young Adults - to the contest. The contest is judged by an acclaimed author in each genre who is not affiliated with the program. A winner is chosen in each genre; winners receive a large portion of the printed copies and are featured in a public reading hosted by the program.

Poetry: Becoming A God byThomas Moody

Selected by Donna Masini, author of Turning to Fiction: Poems.

"Terrible times require poems that interrogate and confront. Here is a book built on questions and cross-examinations. (Watch the many permutations of “cross” that move through these poems.) It’s an unabashedly “male” book that, in part, investigates the idea, the historical repercussions of, “maleness”. I found myself hearing Rukeyser’s “No more masks! / No more mythologies!” as I read the title poem with its litany of imprisoned selves: “No longer do I have to worry / about masks. There is no / mask, it has calcified / onto my face so that I have / become what I always / wanted and now I cannot / be anything else.” In a world in which celebrity rules, quite literally, with its reality TV president, Becoming a God explores what it might mean to be ordinary, unheroic, to live uncelebrated in the quotidian world."

THOMAS MOODY is Australian and lives in New York.

Writing for Children and Young Adults: Maybe the Flamingos by Julia Lynn Rubin

Selected by Jan Carr, author of Toe Shoe Mouse.

Maybe the Flamingos by Julia Lynn Rubin distinguishes itself with its vivid protagonist and compelling voice. This confident opening to a YA novel is crafted with a deft hand. In the depressed landscape of their tiny town, Daisy and her friend Emily drive past housing projects and an abandoned mill to flirt with boys who work at the roadside fireworks stand. Daisy is sexually and emotionally reckless, passing out drunk at the VFW Hall, not quite remembering whom she slept with. What keeps us rooting for her is her knowing take on her bleak circumstances. The knickknack tourist shop off the highway makes her feel “unspeakably lonely.” And the female music teacher she had an affair with “was nothing special really. I just made myself believe that she was.” Rubin folds in tantalizing tastes of Daisy’s childhood; when she was six, she made “haphazard breakfasts” to buoy her mom. When Daisy finds out that she herself is pregnant, there’s a gut-wrenching passage in which she details the sad path her life might now take. But through it all, she takes pleasure in her close, sustaining friendship with Emily, and the grace notes that illuminate it, for instance, the late afternoon sunlight hitting Emily’s face “like a splash of gold against porcelain,” even while “The days were growing shorter and shorter, like inches being hemmed off a dress.”

JULIA LYNN RUBIN is a graduate of The New School’s MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults program. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as the North American Review, Riprap Literary Journal, and Sierra Nevada Review. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is currently working on her next young adult novel.

Nonfiction: The Stories We've Built by Parrish Turner

Selected by Jill Bialosky, author of History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life.

"The Stories We’ve Built is an absorbing, stirring and rhapsodic lyric exploration of body and gender. “Could you help me with something? ….how do you get do you be a girl?” the narrator asks, struggling with an identity that doesn’t make sense. The pages move from an examination of THE DSM IV: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition listing the characteristics of Gender Identity Disorder, a diagnosis for individuals seeking to transition, to stereotypical sex roles in make-believe play such as tea parties and dance lessons for girls, climbing, hooting and hollering for boys, to the inevitability of puberty, where bodily changes such as getting one’s first bra and menstruation enact their own inner wars. What emerges in this bold essay in three parts is the sense of dislocation and estrangement from a body in which the narrator is held prisoner to the transformation that occurs when the body moves into a shape more familiar with itself. “I was taught the narrative I needed to have, so I procured it,” the narrator boldly states. The Stories We’ve Built is a brave, dynamic and moving depiction of the body and the mind in search of its true home."

PARRISH TURNER is an editor and essayist who hails from Georgia. He was a 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction and received his MFA from The New School in 2017. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Gertrude Press, and Gaslight. His work centers race, gender, regionality, religion, and sex. For more information, visit www.parrishturner.com.

Fiction: Texas Toast by Fahima Haque

Selected by Nick Laird, author of Modern Gods.

"Texas Toast seemed to fully realize its ambition. The story lived as a piece of fiction: it captured the tensions of an urban high school, and the code switching that all young people learn to do naturally. It created a real world with real people in it, demonstrating emotional understanding and using the well-judged demotic - and occasionally electric - language. The shifts of the story were well-handled: its narrative tensions promised some future turmoil that kept the plot moving forward, and there was a sense that the writer was always in control of the material. I'd have liked to keep on reading."

FAHIMA HAQUE graduated from The New School with an MFA in Fiction in 2017 and is a social media editor at The New York Times. She's disproportionally proud of being born and raised in Elmhurst, Queens and is working on a short story collection focusing on just that.

"Nothing says America louder than a gun." The new anthology Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, published by the University of New Mexico Press and co-edited by Deirdra McAfee (MFA '04), examines the use of guns in literary fiction, as objects and metaphors. It is the only such collection edited by women; women also wrote more than half the book’s "gun stories."

In taking no "political stance," the editors conceived the book as a way to spark reasonable conversation on a subject so politicized that it’s become almost impossible to discuss. Lock & Load: Armed Fiction brings readers stories by such distinguished American writers as Annie Proulx, John Edgar Wideman, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Pinckney Benedict, Rick DeMarinis, and Jim Tomlinson, as well as fresh, new stories by writers from across the country, chosen after a nationwide call.

Alumna Deirdra McAfee and her co-editor BettyJoyce Nash originated, organized, edited, and ushered Lock & Load: Armed Fiction into print. McAfee’s work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Nash’s work has appeared in NDQ, Broad River Review, and elsewhere; she won the 2015 F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Prize.

Read more about the anthology in the editors' recent article "American Goddess" on Medium.

Of the 37 books published by Creative Writing Program alumni in 2017, and the 10 books published by program faculty, eight books have landed on Best Books of 2017 lists. Best Books Lists featuring New School alumni and faculty include those from The New York Times, NPR, Kirkus Review, The Huffington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, and Seventeen Magazine. Congratulations to all!